1413 

Ml 




ftge William Curtis 



A TRIBUTE 



TO THK 



LIFE AND PUBLIC SERVICE 



OF 



George William Curtis, 



READ BEFORE 



THE AMERICAN SOCIAL SCIENCE ASSOCIATION, 



AT 



Saratoga, N. Y., September 8, 1893, 



BV 



EDWARD B. MERRiLL. 



189: 



T5 1^"^ - 



GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 



A Tribute to His Life and Public Service. Read before the American 

Social Science Association, at Saratoga, N. Y., 

September 8 , 1893, 



EDWARD B. MERRILL. 



"\ 1 /E come in obedience to the dictates of our hearts, in the acknowl- 
•'* edgment of a personal duty, and in the observance of a beautiful 
custom — a custom coincident with the tears shed at the first grave — to 
pay a tribute to the memory of our friend. 

And although it is difficult to say anything wliolly new concerning 
him, we may also ask if it is yet full time to tell what manner of man he 
altogether was ? 

"Many places have already spoken his eulogy," more perhaps, 
I hazard the opinion, than in times past have given up the hour, 
to trace the lines along which his character was developed ; to 
make more distinct and clear to our apprehension his labors, the 
habits of his daily life, the charming qualities of his personal pres- 
ence, the delights of his companionship, the even and unsurpassed 
high level and elevated tone of his writings as a journalist, his scholar- 
ship, his grace of manner, his sincerity in action, his great common 
sense, his iron will and personal courage, giving him rightfully his 
place among the men of history who dared to take the responsibil- 
ity upon rare occasions, when no one else could speak the word ; to 
a consideration of the purity of his literary style, his love for the 
people to whom the sovereignty of our country was long since and 
originally dedicated, his love of art, books, music, nature, of little 
children, his respect for his neighbors, his devotion to the cause of 
education, and to the effort to bring in an era of purer politics and 
wiser laws and their administration, of all these conceded virtues all of 
which were his, I hazard the opinion, more has been written and said 
since the last sad day when they laid him to rest forever, than has been 
written or said of any other private American citizen during or before 
the period in which he lived in our American Republic. For he was, 
partly by reason of circumstances, but more largely, I believe, from his 
own personal choice, holding no political office by election, and of his 
own will seeking none, (He at one time told me that the only office he 



would accept would be the Presidency of the Century Club), not eve i 
the graduate of any American college, a child, in a measure, of tlie 
school system of New England and the traditions of its early settlers ; 
inheriting by birth the temperament of the student, the patriot, and the 
moralist, yet bringing to bear through all his career those qualities of 
mind which compel observation of affairs and the study of the philosoph- 
ical relations of events as they occur, obedient in his conduct and wor- 
ship to the finest usages, moral forces and highest ideals transmitted 
from his own ancestry among the earliest settlers of Massachusetts and 
Rhode Island, and from the Puritan Pilgrims and from all the other 
sectarists of that early period, and with all these and more behind him, 
with the world before him and every door opening wide at his coming, 
he lived for the more than three score years allotted to him, and he died, 
distinctively a private citizen. 

Of whom else among his contemporaries can so much be truly said ? 

And how with no discordant note the whole people united in the 
pean which affirmed his praise and eulogy, with what willing hands 
they brought the leaf with which to weave a chaplet to bind his brow ! 

By the Press, to which vocation he gave so great a part of himself, 
and by whose influence, journalism at its best, in these latter days has 
become co-ordinate with literature ; by the Pulpit, for which no 
one, not even its brightest ornament, harbors in his mind a larger rever- 
ence than did he ; at the College festivals, upon whose platform no 
orator of our time was ever more welcome, nor any speaker whose 
mature thoughts clothed in such captivating form ever inspired such 
confidence, or attracted more willingly, or led with easier step to attain 
to a higher life the young men of this Republic; by the resolutions of 
all the various organizations with which he was in sympathy — chart- 
ered to subserve every philanthropic and reformatory step taken that the 
citizenship of his time might be helped forward, and made more 
patriotic and less venal ; by all the different societies the observance of 
whose anniversaries was incomplete if he was absent ; in the State 
Legislatures, in the clubs, in the chance gatherings of friends to whom 
"his memory is myrrh, and his presence was frankincense and flowers," 
and to whom his acquaintance was an education in ethics ; at the fire- 
sides of his neighbors, to whom the example of his daily life lent the 
argument in support of the sunny side of their various creeds ; in city, 
town and village, and by the countryside, in poem and prose ; his 
character and virtues, his rectitude and sincerity, his mental equipment 
and industry, and his long and open career so various and so interest- 
ing, and by which the many sides of his nature are clearly disclosed, 
have been discoursed upon, and by all these and more his eulogy has 
been amply spoken and approved. 

It is little indeed that I shall be able to add to this wealth of praise, 



and I must bespeak your largest indulgence if I fail to reach that high 
level which the subject, and a due consideration for this Association of 
which he " was at one time President, and always in full and active 
sympathy with your aims," demands. 

The nobility by nature of his ancestors, his place of birth, his 
studies, travels and occupations through the nearly threescore and ten 
years which were allotted to liim to live, have become so well-known by 
repetition, that I might well leave those reminiscences for a more com- 
petent hand. I shall treat them but briefly, and in such a way as may 
lead us by gradual and easy steps to the view I take of the permanent 
result of Mr. Curtis' career. 

He came attended by that great company, his contemporaries, all 
of them his personal friends — the founders one may justly say of our 
distinctive American literature — and whose names are now "familiar as 
household word " throughout the civilized world. The year he was 
born, Irving had published but three of his ever welcomed volumes, all 
of which are still read ; Holmes was at school ; Whittier a lad at work 
upon the farm ; Emerson was at Harvard ; both Longfellow and Haw- 
thorne were class-mates at Bowdoin College ; Lowell was just totter- 
ing into boyhood, and from over the sea Charles Lamb, just retiring 
from his clerkship in India House, stood, as if silently w:aitingfor some 
successor worthy from mental kinship to wear henceforth the bays of 
Elia, and living but a few years, departed bidding our friend hail and 
farewell. 

He was born into the " soul-liberty " of Roger Williams, at 
Providence, in February, 1824, within sound of the bell and in the 
shadow of Brown University, of which he was always a loyal foster- 
child, as he became afterwards to be almost the favorite among her 
many foster-sons. This phrase was a frequent text with him ; he lived 
true to this principle throughout his whole career, cherishing and im- 
parting the spirit and meaning of the fullest " soul-liberty " as best he 
could, in its broadest interpretation, and he has made the word, by his 
apt use of it, so familiar that it has become a current coin in letters and 
a synonym of freedom in its broadest significance. 

His mother died while he was very young. His maternal grand- 
father was Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Rhode Island, and 
held in high esteem. He died while he was from that State a member 
of the U. S. Senate, and when holding this latter office was a pronounced 
opponent of slavery. 

His father was a man of high position in the mercantile community, 
and, I have heard, transmitted much of the charm of his voice and 
courtesy of manner to his distinguished son. 

After he had been at a boarding school at Jamaica Plain for a few 
years and subsequently with a private tutor, in obedience to the wishes 



of his father he was placed with a German importing house in New 
York. 

The boy's school days near Boston, and his experience in Exchange 
Place, are supposed to be freely given in "Trumps." Mr. Curtis' only 
novel (1858-9). 

* I should hesitate to pass judgment upon this book as being a good 
or a poor novel, for I have been often told by my companion, who sits 
at the other end of my own hearthstone, that I do not know a good 
novel when I read one, and whether it be good or poor, and whether it 
be true or not that it was not his most successful book I must express 
the opinion that the book is worth reading, without regard to the 
presence or absence in its pages of those dramatic or descriptive situa- 
tions, or competent analyses and delineations of character, the presence 
of which are requisite to the make-up of a good novel. I must aver 
that the whole book is worth reading alone for the admirably descrip- 
tive chapter upon the preaching of Drs. Channing and Summertield; the 
character of Lawrence Newt, the honest merchant, and for the dis- 
covery that before he had taken his later position of a recognized 
journalist, the author clearly perceived and well understood the 
tricks and methods of the " boss-politicians," and so could preserve in 
this literary form the lasting infamy of General Arcularius Belch. 

One year of business placed Curtis where years before it had placed 
Agassiz, who, being similarly constrained by the wishes of his father, 
entered a counting house, and who said, after he had obtained the dis- 
tinguished position as a naturalist into which he was born, that "if he 
had followed a business pursuit he would probably have become 
nothing but a mere banker." So it was with Mr. Curtis. In 1840 the 
transcendental movement had progressed so far as to invite the interest 
of scholars and other thoughtful people, both men and women, every- 
where, and Mr. Curtis, then tiring of his semi-forced occupation as 
clerk, threw it up and went to Brook Farm. 

He was then a boy but sixteen years of age. This step on his part 
and the one just succeeding it, were the steps by which, as I think, were 
determined the final issues of his educational life. 

The intimate family relation and association by this lad at this im- 
pressionable age — possessed by no vanity, nor false pride, but modest, 
courteous, industrious, with a taste for books and a natural aptitude for 
learning, a native literary faculty and a receptive spirit — with the dwell- 
ers, neighbors and visitors at Brook Farm was of inestimable advantage 
to him, exceeding that of all the schools besides. 

Add to this his later residence in Concord, with the out-of-door work 
and days, with his admitted and welcome intercourse with Emerson, (at 
that time forming a friendship and respect for one another which never 
abated while either lived,) and with Hawthorne, Thoreau, Margaret 



Fuller, and all the other disciples who dwelt near that tabernacle, and 
one may estimate somewhat the sources of his early inspiration and the 
intellectual foundation for all his subsequent work. 

No adequately complete and continuous account of the origin, 
purport and dispersing of the community of Brook Farm has been 
written. But sketches, more or less true, may be read in various vol- 
umes. I have heard it said that Mr. Curtis was never fully satisfied with 
the spirit or comprehension of the subject by those authors whom he 
had read, and was too busy and preoccupied with his own work to 
undertake it himself. I can tell you nothing in detail which will be 
new regarding it. But I think no one well informed of the character, 
attainments and purposes of those who first conceived the plan — so 
scholarly and philanthropic, so earnest and sincere were they all in this 
early and misdated effort to realize an ideal conception of common life — 
no one can pass a judgment of their attempt, measured by its intellec- 
tual and spiritual results, as being otherwise than a great if not the 
greatest, single movement of Christian Philosophers on this continent. 

Although we seldom meet in his writings with any direct reference 
to Brook Farm, or any confession of his thorough appreciation of the 
effort, or the trace of any indication that he was affected by its tran- 
scendental spirit, and although it was early disbanded, yet time has 
justified the formation of the society and its fundamental spirit can 
never be lost to us. Just as a hitherto concealed and unknown spring 
in the earth, by some seismic influence is released from its hidden home, 
and flows thenceforth through its newly found portals to gratify and 
refresh the arid land, on every side alluring it to a new use and finer 
beauty ; so the intellectual impulse, born of this community, breaking 
through the sordid and material crust which still seemed to overlay 
and weigh down the spiritual progress of the practical mind of New 
England, released from any further fear or mistrust of a love for the 
loftiest idealism, flowed forth in a bright and sparkling current, and 
moving westward by slow approaches, so infected the common tempera- 
ment of the people as to make the character of Lincoln possible, filled 
the valley of the father of rivers with the hopes of a new manhood, and 
opened the doors of a great university at the feet of the Golden Image, 
worshipped at the Golden Gate on our Western Sea. 

With this environment in this new atmosphere, infiltrate by the 
influences of this school, and beneath the muffled blows of a new 
science and a new scholarship, of literature and of a faith m the obliga- 
tions to the highest duties, this image shall yet be found disintegrated, 
and its dust "scattered like chaff upon the summer threshing floor." 
Verily, as Emerson says, verily, '' When the great God lets loose a 
thinker on this planet then all things are at risk." 



" Fear, Craft and Avarice 
Cannot rear a State. 
Out of dust to build 
What is more than dust, — 
Walls Amphion piled 
Phoebus 'stablish must. 
When the Muses nine 
With the Virtues meet. 
Find to their design 
An Atlantic seat. 
By green orchard boughs, 
Fended from the heat. 
Where the Statesman ploughs 
Furrows for the wheat ; 
When the Church is social worth, 
When the State house is the hearth. 
Then the perfect State is come, 
The republican at home." 

" He only who builds upon ideas builds for eternity." 
In 1846, Mr. Curtis made his first and only visit to Europe and the 
East. He travelled extensively and observingly over the Continent, and 
vv^as matriculated at the University of Berlin. His time was passed 
wisely -and profitably in his-studies of politics and history, of music, of men 
and of natural scenery; and either by the diligence, or on foot, by the rail- 
way or camel's-back, or by the dahabieh, with most delightful travelling 
companions he saw and heard all that, in those times, and for all times 
is worth seeing and hearing in those portions of the earth's earliest 
civilizations. The personal enjoyment which he reaped from these 
active and engrossing years was of more importance in its results to 
us than to him, from the literary fruit they afterwards bore. 

This fruit, " The Nile Notes," " The Howadji in Syria," and much 
of what is embodied in " Lotus Eating," and many of his " Easy 
Chair " papers, he offered to us with a modesty only excelled by the 
great delight by which it was, and always will be, enjoyed. No student 
of Egypt or of Syria and the Holy Land, will have completed his 
studies of that ancient and withered civilization, until he has had the 
good fortune of looking through the atmosphere of that far oxi and 
tropical clime through the bright and cheerful spectacles of our friend. 
His philosophy of travel he expresses in this way : " The highest value 
of travel is not the accumulation of facts, but the perception of their 
significance. It is not the individual pictures and statues we saw in 
Italy, nor the elegance of Paris, nor the comfort in England, nor the 
splendor of the Orient in detail, which are permanently valuable. It is 
the breadth they give to experience, the more reasonable faith they in- 
spire in the scope of human genius, the dreamy distances of thought 
with which they surround life. In the landscape which we enjoyed as 



a varied whole, what do we care for the branching tree or the winding 
river, although we know that without tree or river there would be no 
landscape ! When Italy, and Syria, and Greece, have become thoughts 
in your mind, then you have truly travelled." 

In these books, the reader will be transplanted to the East, and here 
may gather the impressions of the poet, the scholar, the critic, and the 
shrewd and humorous observer of men and things, conveyed in a style 
of exquisite daintiness; rich with the "cordial juices of the peach and 
plum ;" full of the fragrance of Scripture, enhanced by his own sympathy, 
his culture, and his religious spirit, broad, catholic, profound, embracing 
every people in every clime, and saturated with the sweetness and aroma 
of flowers and song. 

He was still a young man, not yet thirty years of age, when these 
books were first published. They were received both abroad and at 
home with high praise, and now after the lapse of forty years, re-reading 
them with our better knowledge of the Orient, of the author and of his 
mental powers, they seem to be even more valuable, than at that period 
they promised to be. 

You leave them in full accord with the crisp, epigrammatic criticism 
of Rufus Choate ; a copy of the " Poetry of the East," by Rev. Wm. 
Alger, had been sent to him. Meeting the author soon after he remarked 
to him, " I examined your 'Poetry of the East' with a great deal of 
interest. The Orientals seem to be amply competent to metaphysics ; 
wonderfully competent to poetry, scarcely competent to virtue, utterly 
incompetent to liberty." 

He returned from Europe disciplined by his constant study, obser- 
vation and experiences of long travel in the congenial companionship of 
Hedge, Cranch and Kensett, with his mind well equipped for the work 
which was before him. 

The faultless expression of his poetic taste ; his love of books ; of 
nature in all her various moods ; his delight in the occupations 
nourished best in the still air of the library of the student; his gentle 
sarcasm tinged with a savor of sadness as he paints with a free pen the 
follies of the gilded youth and their forgetfulness of noblesse oblige^ the 
foolishness and vanity of an ambition to gain the things that perish ; 
all these by his cultivated powers of literary description and comparison 
of nature and the best results of human efforts, together with the de- 
lights of travel, he gave to us in " Lotus Eating" in 1852. 

In one passage he says : " Many a man to whom Niagara has 
been a hope, and an inspiration, and who has stood before its majesty 
awe stricken and hushed, secretly wonders that his words describing it 
are not pictures and poems. But any great natural object, a cataract, 
an Alp, a storm at sea, are seed too vast for any sudden flowering. They 
live in experience moulding life. At length the pure peaks of noble 



aims and the broad flow of a generous manhood betray that in some 
happy hour of youth you have seen the Alps and Niagara." 

In this same year he began his first work upon Harper s Magazine, 
and commenced his genial comments upon society, which later led up to 
the " Potiphar Papers." 

Of Putnani's Magazine, established in 1853, he, associated with Mr. 
Godwin and Mr. Briggs, became a co-editor. Mr. Godwin says, that in 
an editorial conference, it was settled that each editor should write a 
paper upon " Parties," believing that in those warm political times such 
a series would bring this new literary venture into favorable and wide 
.public notice. And in this wise Curtis showed with characteristic 
humor his interpretation of the scheme and appreciation of the wishes 
of the reading public, by producing his " Potiphar Papers." Later in 
the same magazine he published his " Prue and I," the most charming 
bit of continuous sentiment he ever wrote. 

Every one who reads anything has read it, and it would seem super- 
fluous to mention it further here. It is a prose idyl, full to the end with 
the most delightful comments of society and of men and women ; of 
autobiographic recollections and sentiments ; of dreams, fantasies and 
whims, all clothed in such a charming literary garb and with such veri- 
similitude of time and place and mood that the reader is carried along 
its pages in the company of the simple-hearted but philosophic book- 
keeper and his wife, sympathizing in all their pains and sorrows, their 
simple pleasures and their honest joys, and when you close the book 
and lay it down it seems as though you were saying " good bye " for the 
last time to the hero, your most loyal friend, because he was the friend 
of every honest thought and manly deed. 

The " Homes of American Authors " was also published in 
Putnam'' s. 

His business connection with the publication of the magazine was 
less fortunate. But I need not rehearse what has been so often told to 
the credit of the great sense of personal honor which was one of the 
marked characteristics of the man. By reason of it he became one 
among many great living teachers and lay preachers of a now almost for- 
gotten system, which extended more widely over our northern States his 
literary reputation; and delighted every audience by the charms of his 
presence, by the sound of his marvellous voice, his grace of manner, his 
captivating scholarship and rare judgment of men, of books, of literature, 
and of life. Innismany lyceum lectures throughout the East and West, 
through thirteen long and tedious winters, while of such great advan- 
tage to us all, I cannot but feel that he superimposed upon himself 
through his delicate and refining moral sense, a labor uncalled for by 
any legal or by the best mercantile judgment concerning a business 
obligation, and erected a barrier between himself and the honors which 



belonged to him by reason of his genius and attainments. He had 
not then, and never in all his life, had any time to pay attention to any- 
thing except the duty next in hand. Then it was to pay a debt laid upon 
a friend through the neglect or oversight of another, and though death 
follow the effort, with him was the undying sentiment that that debt 
must be paid. 

It was during this period that he delivered, by invitation, his course 
of lectures upon "The English Novelists," before the Lowell Institute 
in Boston. His lectures upon Thackeray, and upon Dickens, and 
Charlotte Bronte, which he often repeated subsequently before other 
audiences, were three of the twelve lectures he prepared for this course. 
He was then about thirty years of age. The invitation was a great 
compliment to so young a man, but his habits of reading and study 
from the beginning, his long travel, his acquaintance with many of the 
authors themselves, his critical judgment, his literary charm of style 
and grace of delivery, and his most attractive personality, were an 
augury of the complete triumph he obtained. No more popular or 
popularly instructive course of lectures was, I venture to say, ever 
delivered before that noble institution, whose management, since its 
first dedication to science and letters, has received upon its platform 
the most noted scholars of the English speaking world. I can just 
recall their wide-spread interest and popularity, and how those who 
could not hear, read them with avidity and delight as they were re- 
ported in the press. I can only refer you now for comparison, to the 
interest taken in London in his course of lectures upon " Moral 
Philosophy," as described by Lady Holland in the life of her father, 
Sidney Smith. 

Of his other lectures, and of the lecture system, I avail myself of 
what Mr. Chadwick has so well written. " His rivals were Beecher, and 
Chapin, and Parker, and Emerson, and Phillips, and many of less note, 
but no one was welcomed more cordially than he, or did less to debase 
the currency which he exchanged for F. A. M. E., as Chapin called it. 
Fifty and ' my expenses, then a maximum rate.' Parker was more 
massive, Emerson more profound and mystical, Phillips more incisive, 
Chapin more vehement, Beecher more humorous and impassioned ; 
but no other had his perfect charm of voice and manner, suiting the 
dignity of noble thoughts expressed in cadences that were like music 
to the ear. Many of his lectures were upon literary subjects, but al- 
ways with a lively feeling for the personality behind the book. His 
* Sir Philip Sidney ' was related to his repertory much as Phillips', ' Lost 
Arts' to his which was much more contracted ; and ever as men heard, 
they confused the speaker with the man of whom he spoke. 

' What Sidney's fame was, his shall be — 
A gracious name to men. 
With more than Sidney's chivalry. 
And more ih.Tii .Sidney s pen ' 



As the anti-slavery combat deepened, his lectures took its impress 
more and more, until frequently it became his solitary theme, and he 
must go from Dr. Furness' house, in the peaceful and Quaker City of 
Philadelphia, to the lecture hall with six revolvers in the pockets of as 
many friends, to insure his safety." 

It was in October, 1853, that Mr. Curtis first began his series of 
essays for the " Easy Chair " in Harper s Magazine. It will probably 
not be questioned that it is by those productions that he has become so 
widely known as a purely literary man. And it is hardly necessary, in 
this presence, to attempt any analysis or criticism upon them. As 
various in topic as they are elegant and elevated in style and tone, the 
series covers every subject: men, society, fads and fashions, recollections, 
natural scenery, philosophy, poetry, satire, humor, criticism of books, 
tributes to departed friends, politics in the larger sense, and whatsoever 
can suggest itself to a literary worker of such wide observation as his, 
such cultivation of mental qualities, such high moral tone, such courage, 
and pure regard for the welfare of common people, and such apprecia- 
tion and worship of the highest ideals of life. Their first appearance 
was an epoch in American literature. They follow in literary develop- 
ment the long series of essays upon the common but interesting affairs 
of daily life which were begun more than a century before, by those 
well preserved and still read papers vi'hich made the names of Addison, 
Steele and Goldsmith familiar to our youth ; books for instruction and 
delight, and which complete a seeming solidarity of the mental culture 
of the Anglo-Saxon race. We need have no apprehension that the 
" Easy Chair " at its best will lose anything in any aspect of our criti- 
cism — whether it be knowledge of men and affairs, purity of style, or 
purity of moral tone — by the coldest comparison with The Tattler, The 
Spectator, or The Citizen of the World. It will live forever in literature 
with them, to be held in praise higher by as much as the moral tone of 
social life of this day, and the customs of polite society, are purer, 
sweeter and more gracious than were those of the past century in 

England. 

" What is excellent, 
As God lives, is permanent." 

No higher praise could be given it, no more sorrowful recognition 
that the Easy Chair was vacant, nor greater sense of the loss we must 
bear, than that at Mr. Curtis' death the series was discontinued. 
" The silent organ loudest chants 
The master's requiem." 

In 1856, General Fremont was a candidate for the Presidency, and 
it was in this campaign and in his support that Mr. Curtis first en- 
tered actively into political life. In this year also he made his distin- 
guished literary address at Wesleyan University, upon " The Relation 



of the American Scholar to Politics and the Times." I think it was 
perhaps this address which first attracted toward him, as a political 
thinker and guide, the attention of the young men of America, an 
attention which the longer continued and faithful it was, was sure, in the 
thirty years of thought and counsel derived from it, to -develop and en- 
rich their great and unswerving confidence and affection which became 
his, and his almost alone of the political leaders of his day. It was a 
position of which he or any man might be proud, to be the leader and 
guide of the youth of a great Republic. What nobler position, or 
higher, may man ask, and what greater praise can be bestowed than 
that, neither by line or word of all he said, or of all he wrote either in 
politics or literature, in all the forty years of his mental activity and 
public work, did he say or write a word or line which would corrupt, or 
mislead with false doctrine the young men of his time. To no mind, 
more than to his own, was there ever present a more constant watchful- 
ness of the progress of this Republic, or a more constant effort that this 
progress might be carried along upon the highest levels of national de- 
velopment, nor to any one v/as the truth ever more distinctly present, 
that to the young men is entrusted the future and the fortunes of their 
country. 

From this time forward and until the day of his death, he took deep 
and active interest in pubic affairs. 

In i860, he was a delegate to the Convention which nominated 
Abraham Lincoln, and although Seward was his candidate, yet with 
constitutional independence of judgment and conduct, he refused to 
bind himself to vote only for him. To no one more than to him was 
there afterwards a keener appreciation of the fact that it was a happy 
fortune which gave the honor to the less experienced but wiser man. 
It was in a short speech which he made at this Convention that he won 
one of his earliest and most significant triumphs as a political orator. 

The so-called practical and self-constituted leaders, the self-con- 
sidered wise and hard-headed politicians, had not only proposed among 
themselves to dictate the movements of that body, but had also ar- 
ranged that in that first great gathering of the Republican party just 
preceding the Civil War, there should be nothing " inflammatory " in 
their declarations which might serve to disturb the border States. 
When the Platform was reported from the Committee, Joshua Giddings 
of Ohio, who had been one of the leaders, as he was one of the founders 
and fathers of the party, moved an amendment to it, embracing the 
immortal words of the Declaration of Independence. Some such motion 
was expected, so at a preconcerted signal being given by these " lead- 
ers," the motion was voted down, and Giddings turned to leave the 
Convention. " It seemed to me," said Mr. Curtis afterwards, " it 
seemed to me that the spirits of all the martyrs to freedom were march- 



ing out of the Convention behind the venerable form of that indignant 
and outraged old man." 

Mr. Curtis sprang to his feet and renewed the motion. His voice 
was drowned in the opposing clamor. A writer in the press thus de- 
scribes the scene : 

" Folding his arms, he calmly faced the uproarious mass and 
waited. The spectacle of a man who would not be put down, at length 
so far amused the delegates that they stopped to look at him. 

' Gentlemen,' rang out the musical voice, in tones of calm inten- 
sity, ' Gentlemen, this is the convention of free speech, and I have been 
given the floor. I have only a few words to say to you, but I shall say 
them if I stand here until to morrow morning.' 

Again the tumult threatened the roof of the wigwam, and again the 
orator waited. His own moral courage and pluck, and the chairman's 
gavel, soon gave him another chance. Skilfully changing the amend- 
ment to the second resolution, to make it in order, he spoke, as with a 
tongue of fire, in its support, daring ' the representatives of the party 
of freedom, meeting on the borders of the free prairies, in a hall 
dedicated to the advancement of liberty, to reject the doctrine of the 
Declaration of Independence, affirming the equality and defining the 
rights of man.' " 

The speech fell upon that audience like a spark upon tinder, the 
members came to themselves, their souls glowed anew with the fires of 
love for universal and equal liberty on this continent, and his amend- 
ment was adopted with a shout of enthusiasm more unanimous and 
deafening than was the yell of scorn with which it had been previously 
rejected. 

This was his opportunity, and he accepted it, to make his first 
personally historic impression upon our national politics, and to add his 
wise counsels in giving direction to a national party. No one could do 
more. He could do no less. It places his name among those, who, on rare 
occasions in history, have dared to take the responsibility. " I cannot 
do otherwise. God wills it." 

With a serene confidence in the holiness of the cause in which he 
was enlisted ; with an unquestioning faith in the purity of the motives 
of the people who were behind it ; with a sincere confidence in the 
validity of the reasons for his party's existence, he, by this personal 
effort, became at one bound its Abdiel, " Faithful among the faithless, 
faithful only he." 

From this time onward his position in politics as a thinker upon the 
broadest lines ; as a leader of unquestionable moral courage ; as a guide 
of the purest motives, was fixed and recognized all over the land. His 
labors were incessant in every cause in which his interest was engaged, 
and they continued until the end held in view at the outset of the con 



test, was attained. He served his party in all its conventions, national 
and state, and in those which are held to subserve more local interests, 
with the fidelity which was a part of himself and which he could not 
neglect, and he often served either as a presiding officer, or as the chair- 
man of the Committee on Resolutions. 

In 1867, he was a member of the Convention, among the delegates 
at large, called to amend the Constitution of the State of New York. 
He there served as the most efficient chairman of the Committee on 
Education, and therein performed most excellent service in lending his 
aid towards the permanent endowment of Cornell University, in the 
debate regarding the disposition of the public scrip appropriated for 
Agricultural Schools. It was while in this Convention that he delivered 
his argument upon conferring the right of suffrage upon woman. Of 
course his proposition was voted down, but not until the members had 
listened, charmed by his manner, instructed, but not persuaded by his 
arguments, to a speech which he seldom if ever subsequently surpassed 
in the demonstration of the amplitude of his historical knowledge, in 
the sharpness of his satire, the kindliness of his humor, or the reason- 
ableness of his logical position and his knowledge of jurisprudence. 

Before the Civil War had closed, in 1863, he became the political 
editor of Harper s Weekly. He here secured the widest possible oppor- 
tunity for public service, and a " door of utterance " wider, more com- 
manding and ampler, than any other which he had held before, as either 
lecturer or platform orator. 

This position he held until the close. 

Through this door, went far and wide, week by week, even to the 
*' ends of the earth and to the uttermost parts of the sea," his editorials; 
clear, clean and forcible, elevated in tone, bringing journalism up to the 
level, in many instances, of pure literature ; sincere in motive, elegant 
in form, irrefutable as to the facts, impregnable in their logic, the gar- 
land of flowers concealing oftentimes the tendon of steel beneath; 
always and at every period of time urging uncompromisingly freedom 
for man, political justice, the highest conceptions of principle and con- 
duct, and the subversion of intrigue and pplitical jugglery, whereby the 
interests of his pure democracy, " the unrestrained aspiration and ex- 
pectation of the new man," should be put at risk. 

It was an unusually broad-minded, liberal and generous member of 
the so-called stalwart wing of the Republican party in Pennyslvania, 
who replied to the question of his friend, another adherent of the same 
wing, but who was more stalwart : *' You don't say that you read 
Curtis' editorials in Harper s Weekly, do you ? " " Read them," he re- 
plied, " Read them, I guess I do, and I can say more, I only wish I could 
write them." So in this unknown way his influence worked, and 
through these unseen channels came to the surface and the sunshine, in 
the surprises on future election days. 



14 

If you will bear in mind also how his occupation of journalist re- 
quired so wide a study of the daily affairs of our own and of every 
other country of the globe, their politics, finance, diplomacy, laws, their 
music, their philantrophies and educational movements, their great men 
living and dying, each of which hold in these latter days so close and 
intimate interest and concern of every intelligent mind here and every- 
where, requiring such constant and engrossing labor and study, such 
clear perceptions on his part, such accurate judgment and such sincere 
comment, meeting at every turn the approval of his friends mingled 
with the bitterest criticism of opponents, the abuse of enemies and the 
obloquy of triflers; how his occupations ran along so easily and quietly 
in a double current for thirty years with the preparation of his literary 
essays and numerous addresses and speeches, each office distinct and 
undisturbed by the other, each work and consummation separate and 
apart from all the others, marking and limiting each vocation off from 
everything else about it, as the fabled waters of the classical fountain 
passed underneath the sea, "but the sweet stream passed under the 
bitter sea, the bitter sea pressed on the sweet stream and each flowed 
unmingled, unchanged in taste or color," — you will the more clearly 
recognize the mental amplitude of the man. 

Almost immediately succeeding the close of the war, the abuses in 
the subordinate Civil Service began to attract a more public attention. 
President Lincoln, meditating in his most trying hour over the doubtful 
results of military movements, bearing upon his shoulders the weight of 
so many public duties, patient beyond all other men of his time with 
the complaints of his friends, the sluggishness and incompetence of 
some in high places, the treachery and fraud of the pretended friends of 
the public cause so near his own heart, but sustained by his own 
patriotic and faithful instincts at a height beyond that of any other 
man, failed to conceal the sorrow and indignation at the selfishness and 
indifference to the then condition of affairs with which the politicians 
and office seekers pressed continually upon his attention, to the great 
detriment of other most delicate and important duties. 

" One month after his first accession, he said he wished he could 
get time to attend to the Southern question ; he thought he knew 
what was wanted, and believed he could do something toward quieting 
the rising discontent, but the office seekers demanded all his time. I 
am like a man so busy in letting rooms in one end of the house, that he 
can't stop to put out the fire that is burning the other." 

" Sitting here," he continued, " where all the avenues to public 
patronage seem to come together in a knot, it does appear to 
me that our people are fast approaching the point where it can be 
said that seven-eighths of them are trying to find out how to live at 
the expense of the other eighth." And to his former law partner, Mr. 



15 

Herndon, he said, " If ever this free people, if this government itself, is 
ever utterly demoralized, it will come from this human virriggle and 
struggle for office, that is, a way to live without work." 

Mr. Lincoln was at one time taken suddenly ill with the varioloid. 
After recovering, he remarked to a friend that there was some satis- 
faction in it after all. It was the first time since he had been President 
that he had anything that he could possibly give, that somebody did not 
want. I lately read that " The Assistant Treasurer, in 1869, discharged 
one hundred and twenty-five clerks to economize the Treasury service ; 
and out of the whole number there were one hundred that had not even 
a desk, or a chair, or any business in the building. So many families in 
Washington are decayed, that in order to prevent the members from 
being a tax in alms houses, they are made a tax in the different official 
bureaus." 

It was after the death of Mr. Lincoln, that the Hon. Thomas A. 
Jenckes of Rhode Island, a member of Congress and a very distinguished 
lawyer, framed and introduced a measure which was the first practical 
step towards Civil Service Reform. By his earnest and capable ad- 
vocacy of this proposed law it was passed, and the slow and halting 
march of this reform from that time was begun. After 1870, and when 
the country had passed through " the reconstruction period, and the 
fruits of the war were harvested beyond all danger of loss or impair- 
ment," Mr. Curtis cheerfully taking the second place in the combat, 
with Mr. Jenckes as chief, began the great work which thereafter en- 
gaged his great power and influence with the public. In 187 1, he was 
appointed by General Grant to the chairmanship of the first Civil 
Service Commission, and from that time to the delivery of his last address 
in Baltimore, in April, 1892, as president of the Civil Service Reform 
League, he was the leader of the movement. 

To the mere politician, the question of Civil Service Reform, at the 
time when it was first thrust upon his unwilling attention, was the least 
attractive question in political matters of these modern days. In- 
noculated as he was, and is, with the poison of the spoils policy, he 
thought he saw, and so asserted, that in a classified service and the 
abolition of all subordinate official positions from the condition estab- 
lished by usage of the necessity of a change of occupants with each 
change of administration, a reduction in the number of votes he might 
occasionally control would result to him by lessening the number of 
small offices to be filled. In this way to him " bossism " in politics 
would, in a large measure, become decrepit, and its attractiveness as an 
occupation destroyed. That was probably exactly what was hoped for 
by the leaders of this new movement. And it was reasonably expected 
that out of this decrepitude and the destruction of this corrupt political 
condition by this overturning of old methods and a revivifying of the 



i6 

public lethargy and indifference by the sunshine of a new patriotism 
and a new faith, there would arise a new growth of public spirit 
and genuine political service of each private citizen to the manifest 
advantage of the country and the people, and to those permanently 
engaged in honorable public service. In this way, and in this way only, 
can a pure democracy carried on upon pure principles of effort and 
action come to its final fruition, and justify itself as a rational form of 
government. 

" In Mr. Curtis' reports, as president of the Commission, he estab- 
lished the fundamental principles of the reform, defined the large lines 
of its methods, and erected its impregnable defence against all constitu- 
tional objection. 

" As president of the League, not only each year did he review the 
progress of the cause, and arouse and instruct public sentiment in its 
support, but not a week, scarcely a day, passed that he was not aiding 
in the suggestion and direction of the work. He lived, happily, to see 
its substantial triumph, and when he passed away could have had no 
fear that his patient, unselfish, untiring effort in its behalf had been 
wasted." 

As in the realm of natural science the elemental forces and every 
form of animated life have reached man through some divine affinity 
and become known through some Berzelius, or Linnaeus, or Morse — 
so it seems as if all through the history of the intellectual development 
of nations we could trace the final embodiment and vivifying of the 
highest ideals and the noblest moral sentiments, in the lives and deeds 
of the great men of the world. And we may not despair of an ultimate- 
ly genuine civilization in our own America, nor of the fulfilment of 
our best hopes for a pure democracy, a republic absolutely free, that this 
last vantage ground upon the earth for the ultimate triumph of the 
human race shall yet become the habitation where man must be 
better, wiser and happier, when the moral sentiment of Patriotism and 
of the stability of Constitutional Government, of equality before the 
law and the clearest purification of practical politics as consummated 
in Civil Service Reform, all reach man without cavil and without dispute 
in those great men, gone before, whom we may call our own. 

When the student shall search for the beginning, in the history of 

our country, of the statements in literature of the endeavor to lift our 

Civil Service up from the slough of pauperism and spoils and to endow 

it with more dignity and intelligence ; he will find that from the earliest 

period of the attempt until his life closed, by common consent 

the controlling spirit and guide, the leader of all was George William 

Curtis. 

" His country held him as her noble son, 

Who strove to make her parties undefiled, 
To lift their feet from out the filth of place, 
And set them where real victories might be won." 



I? 

Such, in the general, was the life and public service of George 
William Curtis from his birth, in 1824, all along through his sixty-eight 
years and down to that pathetic moment on the 29th day of August, 
1892, when, at his modest home, sitting by his bedside and holding the 
hand of his only son, he heard the summons of his Master and answer- 
ing the call, bade us farewell. 

" Lycidas is dead — yes, dead * * * 

******* without a peer." 

I went, with mutual friends, for a short drive among the Berkshire 
Hills, which had early won and kept his praise, in the afternoon in early 
September of the ideal day on which they buried him on that grassy 
slope in the Moravian Cemetery on Staten Island. All nature, as is her 
wont on these " all loving " days, was as serene as the expression upon 
the face of our dead friend ; Greylock at the head of the valley, " all 
tolerant of culture to the top," its sides clothed with the shadows of the 
pine and hemlock, and its footpaths bright with the golden-rod and 
aster and meadow-sweet, stood calm and watchful of life below, of the 
changes of the day and seasons in their turn, as it has stood for ages ; 
the temperature, "which had lost much of the fervent heat of summer," 
was grateful to all our outward senses ; the flowers bloomed undisturbed 
save by the passing air ; the birds held high court in tree and hedge- 
row ; but everything, all this beauty and grandeur and delight, was in 
such contrast and discord with our emotions of sorrow and sense of 
irreparable loss ; this marvellous manifestation of the glory of the 
summer just passing away was in such conflict with our mood as almost 
to make it seem a hollow mockery and sneer, '' a smiling as in scorn " 
and irony at our grief. 

" O ostrich-like forgetfuhiess ! 
O loss of larger in the less ! 
Was there no star that could be sent. 
No Watcher in the firmament ; 
No angel from the countless host 
That loiters round the crystal coast. 
Could stoop to heal that only child. 
Nature's sweet marvel undefiled. 
And kept the blossom of the earth, 
Which all her harvests were not worth. 

***** 
Covetous death bereaved us all, 
To aggrandize one funeral." 

In that distant, lonely, restful spot he sleeps a dreamless sleep. 
The tolling of the bell from the church in the vale ; the low, sweet pre- 
lude of the Moravian hymn, which in one unbroken strain follows each 
morning sun ; the echoes of the accustomed footfalls of the wayfarers 
who are wont to visit the graves of the favorite sons of men ; the twit- 



taring of the passing birds in their flight ; the broad arch of the sky ; 
the silent stars ; the long line of ocean ; the songs of the sailors upon 
the deck of his own " East Indiaman," resting upon the bosom of that 
beautiful bay which he loved so well, and the " lapping of the waves of 
the tireless sea upon the pebbly shore," shall be his requiem forever and 
ever till the heavens be no more. 

Beyond what has been said regarding the career of Mr. Curtis, there 
remains to be briefly considered his faculty of oratory and those traits 
of character in his local and private life for which he was so justly 
esteemed, and those habits and influences of his by which he will be 
longest remembered. 

The attractiveness of oratory itself is so fleeting ; it is so composite 
in its completeness, depending for its finish and effectiveness so greatly 
upon the personality of the speaker, his manner, his voice, his theme, the 
occasion, upon his earnestness and sincerity, together with the responsive 
mood, active and sympathetic or latent, in his hearers, that it is im- 
possible to describe it, or to convey to another its momentary charms 
and effects. You may say that it was classical and cold in Everett, or 
conversational but pyrotechnic in Phillips, or earnest and soul-stirring 
in Beecher, or electric and irresistible in Rufus Choate, but all this 
attempted delineation of what you saw and heard with such rapturous 
delight from each one of them, in the end is mere words in the descrip- 
tion, and falls far short of conveying any appreciative idea of what was 
so effective in its utterance. 

The charm, the enjoyment, the sweet influences, any more than those 
of music and flowers, cannot be carried far away from the occasion 
which produced them, and live only in the memory. 

Soon — too soon — the oratory of our friend will be but a memory. 

About the places that knew him, the public halls, the college plat- 
forms, at the many banquets where he spoke, there still lingers — and 
will yet linger so long as the memory and enthusiasm of the fathers 
remain — traditions of his presence, his marvellous voice, his eloquence ; 
at Wesleyan the old men tell you "it was here, and on one of the marked 
days of my life when I heard his address upon ' The Scholar in Politics ;' " 
at Union they tell you of his oration as Chancellor of the University ; 
at Brown no one can forget his reply to Wendell Phillips in his address 
upon " What the College has done for our Country ;" and in Berkshire 
they recall his noble address upon the unforgotten patriotism of their 
Revolutionary fathers, at the dedication of their soldier's monument, on 
one face of the shaft of which will be forever read this unique inscrip- 
tion, " For the dead, a tribute ; for the living, a memory ; for posterity, 
an emblem of loyalty to the flag of their country." 

So is and shall be recalled with pleasant memory tinged with the 
universal sorrow at his loss, that it was here the gentle scholar talked as 



19 

with a friend ; or here the orator aroused to activity the dormant im- 
pulses for freedom ; or here the philanthropist pleaded the common 
cause of men ; or here the historic places in our land enlarged their 
horizons, and were lifted to a more exceeding glory by the magic of his 
learning and his skill. 

In any gathering of which he was a part, there was no feast until 
he had spoken, and no oratory afterwards. 

From among his many speeches, I am permitted to make a brief 
selection from one which he delivered at a banquet given to the president 
of Brown University, as showing the general high plane to which he 
invited his hearers before he had closed his public after-dinner talks. 

" And yet, when I say that the American college is now required to 
train American citizens, I do not mean that it is to abdicate its highest 
possible function, which is not to impart knowledge — not to impart 
knowledge gentlemen, but to stimulate intellectual and moral power. 
It is a poor education, believe me, that gives accuracy in grammar in- 
stead of a love of letters, that leaves us masters of the integral calculus 
and slaves of a sordid spirit and mean ambition. When I say that it 
is to train Americans, I mean not only that it is to be a gnome of the 
earth, but also a good genius of the higher sphere. With one hand, it 
shall lead the young American to the secrets of material skill ; it shall 
equip him to enter into the fullest trade with all the world ; but with 
the other it shall lead him to lofty thought and to commerce with the 
skies. The college shall teach him the secrets and the methods of 
material success, but above all, as high as Brown University is above 
Market Square, it shall admonish him that man does not live by bread 
alone and that the things which are eternal are unseen. 'The gardens 
of Sicily,' said Lowell, ' the gardens of Sicily are empty now, but the 
bees from every clime still fetch honey from the tiny garden plots of 
Theocritus.' That is honey which is stored in the college cell ; the 
love of beauty, of goodness, the love of truth, the preference for the 
spiritual to the material, the unconquerable conviction that the greatest 
glory a nation has, is not great riches, but noble men." 

For some time the church, of which he was an attendant on Staten 
Island, was without a pastor. He was asked to conduct the service, and 
for several yearsdidso, reading from the published sermons by the clergy 
of all the sects, such as met his high standards of religion and life. He 
sometimes conducted also or assisted at funeral services. This was one 
of the countless neighborly kindnesses of his which he never refused, and 
one which tended greatly to liberalize and unite the society of that 
suburb. The catholicity of the spirit which he brought to the selection 
of the sermons to be read was not controlled by any theological bias, of 
which he had none, against the particular writer, but only sometimes 
by the want of a literary form in accord with his high literary 



instincts for the plan of any discourse. His conduct of religious 
services was exceptional, and very attractive to every one. In the read- 
ing of the Scriptures his enunciation was so clear, the inflections of his 
voice so correct and the Hebrew and Greek idioms as preserved in the 
Bible were so translated into the expressions to which our Western ears 
were accustomed, that its truth and beauty seemed to take on a new 
language and a new influence, and to become nearer and more human 
to his hearers. In his attendance at the last burial rites, I have seen 
the griefs of the mother lightened by his sympathetic service, the faith 
of the father in the Providence of God reawakened and uplifted, and 
the tears of sorrow and despair wiped from every eye. 

I have heard him read during the church service, " Nearer, my 
God, to Thee," and, as the words of the hymn fell from his lips upon 
your listening ear, so calm, so prayerful, so aspiring, so reverent, were 
the tones of his voice that your heart seemed for the moment to hesitate 
to make another pulsation lest it should disturb your rapturous emotion, 
and the thrill of your excitation chilled your blood in its channels, and 
trickled like tears along your nerves like a chord of exquisite music ; 
and when he had ceased, his hearers felt, if he had done nothing else, 
that the hour was full and that a religious service had already been 
performed. 

To quote upon this topic, Mr. Gary, his biographer, says : 

" His public speech was on occasion very stirring, but it was still 
more persuasive, enlightening and convincing. If it had a fault it was 
its faultlessness. The orator's charm was felt the moment he arose. 
His form was manly, strongly built and exquisitely graceful. His head 
was of noble cast and bearing, his features rugged but finely cut ; his 
forehead square, broad and massive ; his lips full and mobile and of 
classic modelling ; his eyes of blue grey, large, deep set under shaggy 
brows, lighted the shadow as with an alter flame, so pure, so gentle and 
so profound was their expression. His voice was a most fortunate 
organ. Deep, musical, yielding without apparent effort the happy in- 
flections suggested by the thought and feeling, clear and bright in the 
lighter passages, ringing now like a bugle, now tender and flute-like, 
and now vibrating in solemn organ notes that hushed the intense 
emotion it aroused. Quite apart from the subject matter of his dis- 
course, there was in his life-time no more delightful and aesthetic 
pleasure than to listen to him when he was at his best. Not a few of 
his speeches will rank among the very best examples of American 
oratory." 

Mr. Curtis did not pass through his long, industrious and open 
career without criticism. It would be strange if he had. Men of such 
strong character as was his are too marked in the community to 
altogether escape notice. And they only, or such as they, become the 



leaders in the march. He had physical health, pluck, an iron will and 
faith, and a great admiration and confidence in men of moral courage ; 
he was pure in heart — the purest man I ever knew ; simple in manners 
and habits of life, sweet in courtesy, a lover of art and nature, of children, 
of man and woman, and of all cultivated things ; he was generous of 
his gifts and no occasion was too simple to engage his active interest 
when so requested by his neighbors ; he had no light vanity which could 
be hurt by the failure of any to hear his speech or read his papers or 
to follow in the ways in which he led. His standard of conduct as a 
private citizen, neighbor, and political guide, was ideal, but yet practical 
and fixed by the immortal rules of the purest morals construed with 
adherence to the admitted canons and philosophy of common sense ; and 
while his native temperament seemed at an early period to express its 
views upon lines which were deemed to be sentimental and theoretic, their 
ultimate adoption by his party at a later period gives him justly the 
high place he will always occupy among American leaders, and shows 
him not to have been a dreamer and doctrinaire, but the friend of all 
men ; of the church ; of law and order ; of the slave ; of liberty and the 
State ; and that what he strove always to impress upon all was his 
absolute moral conviction that the genius of America is the spirit of 
"the absolute equality of opportunity," of truth, of the divinity of labor, 
and integrity ; that no radical wrong may ever be the subject of com- 
promise ; that the rules of all conduct for all men are the dictates of the 
educated conscience, and that the principles of the common law, when 
purely administered, are a system of the highest ethics. 

His mind, as were his lips, was absolutely free from cant, and was 
possessed by a supreme contempt for the Pharisee and demagogue, and 
he never failed to prick with his most caustic pen any wind-bag of pre- 
tension as he appeared. He personified in a higher degree than any 
person whom I have ever known, the absolute and eternal principles 
which underlie and sustain the religion of self-respect. No matter of 
how great or how little general importance was his theme, nor how 
limited the occasion in general interest, nor how few his audience, his 
whole heart was enlisted, and he never felt that he could afford to do 
less than his best. I have heard him address an audience of less than 
twenty persons at an annual meeting of the Civil Service Reform 
Association, with such vigor in action, with an affluence of learning and 
argument, and with an eloquence which he would not have striven to 
surpass had he at the time been endeavoring to convince a hostile 
majority in the Senate of the Ignited States ; and I was told, by one of 
his hearers, that he was still at his best in that last address in a fire 
engine house in the village where he died, at the simple ceremonies 
attendant upon the dedication of a new hose-carriage of the local fire 
company on the decoration day of his last year, where, in commending 



to his neighbors the abiding sentiment of domestic patriotism, he in- 
culcated in his own persuasive and unequalled way their duty to cherish 
respect for civil government, obedience to the laws, and the maintenance 
of civic virtue, without which there is no foundation for public liberty 
— the swan-song of his beautiful and earnest life. 

Conscience, self-respect, public spirit and industry, were the lamps 
by which his feet were guided. Resting upon the spirit of the eternal 
veracities, he did nothing which was outside the limitations of the spirit 
contained in the one word duty. With these guides and in this depend- 
ence he kept his way. 

Political parties are voluntary associations of citizens holding a 
common faith as to the especial needs of the time for legislation and 
administration in behalf of the public good. As any private citizen, 
seeking only to help attain the best thing for the whole, may join such 
an association of his own free will, so I know of no valid reason, if in 
the course of events he should think he had discovered a different object 
in view, or a different principle maintained than at the beginning, or a 
new policy which he could not approve, I know of no reason why he 
should not leave it. All new parties are a growth from a new idea, born 
of the trouble and sorrow of the moment, or in an effort to change the 
policy of the old parties upon some well understood question. Party 
spirit, nursed by the politicians, will easily invent some word of oppro- 
brium for those who assert their new political faith, but these terms of 
scorn have no weight or influence towards scattering a new party formed 
upon an idea which is fully believed in by any considerable body of 
intelligent citizens. And it has been known that the new party has lived 
long enough to make this new name respectable. 

Two or three texts gathered from the common place book of our 
political literature seem together to almost embody the later political 
creed of this scholar and independent political thinker and writer. " It 
is always in order to bolt ;" " you may cheat some of the people some 
of the time, but you cannot cheat all the people all the time ;" " I came 
into this convention a free man, and by the blessing of God I will go 
out of it a free man." 

To think of binding a man of his capacity, courage, knowledge and 
spirit by the political scheming of the spoils-hunter, or that he would 
consent by silence to allow the rights of the many to be betrayed into 
serving the interests of a faction, or that the fundamental principles of 
our national Bill of Rights should be ignored in a national convention of 
one of the great parties, that the timidity of the time serving politicians 
might be sanctioned. He felt that " the duty of the American scholar, 
the Christian scholar, is, as Bacon says, ' to give a true account of his 
gift of reason to the benefit and use of man.' And this cannot be done 
either by withdrawing from the world, or by mingling with it merely to 



23 

win its prizes." A recent writer says : " It is the duty of the educated 
classes to give their hand to arrangements tending to check the impetus 
of the popular will. By such a course temporary or lasting unpopu- 
larity is insured, and the reproach is incurred of want of patriotism or 
want of loyalty. Disloyalty in politics answers to heterodoxy in re- 
ligion ; it is simply the name we give to another man's opinions. But 
the men who are willing to incur this reproach are the very salt that 
keep democratic institutions from decay." 

" When we have established a state of society in which a man be- 
lieving the majority to be in the wrong, does not dare to say so, we have 
made the master and his slave ; only the master is many and the slave 
is one." 

So long as he was deemed to be a regular, and stood up to the line 
in the march of his party, his judgment of men was earnestly sought 
for and gladly accepted as final. And, although he differed often with 
Mr. Sumner and other leaders upon questions of party policy, yet his 
judgment prevailed. But at the last, with his ample experience and 
great knowledge of affairs and of the history of parties, when the 
course towards which the Republican party tended, and the apparent 
objects of its leaders no longer commended themselves to him, and he 
openly expressed as his political creed, that " the clear perception that 
popular government like all other governments is an expedient and not 
a panacea ; that its abuses and evils must be plainly reproved and 
resolutely resisted ; that the price of liberty is not eternal cringing to 
a party, but eternal fidelity to our own minds and consciences ; that 
our fathers made America independent, and that their sons must keep it 
so, each man for himself declaring his mental, moral and political independ- 
ence, not only on the Fourth of July, but every day in the year ; that the 
hopes of free institutions lie in character, in educated intelligence, in self- 
reliance, in quality not in quantity ; and that he deemed this to be the 
sublime faith, the unchilled hope, the untiring endeavor of the patriotism" 
of the wisest men we have; and so following the dictates of his own con- 
science he left that party, then what a storm of obloquy and abuse was 
poured out by the petty politicians upon him, the latchet of whose shoes 
not one of them was worthy to unloose. Need anything further be said in 
defense of his political course, or in praise of that integrity of conduct 
when we all know how manfully, and with what supreme moral courage 
he stood at his watch, keeping his eye clear and his hand steady lest the 
helm of the ship in obeying the passionate trepidations of the needle 
might swerve her from her true course. 

I have heard him called cold, dignified and distant in manner. 
Perhaps he may, in the pre-occupied condition of mind, have seemed so 
to strangers, but he was not so consciously to himself. If he seemed 
dignified it was a dignity born of his own self-respect ; it was tempera- 



24 

mental and such as he carried worthily in strict concurrence with the 
natural law of his mind, and with the character of the true gentleman. 
But cold and remote he could not be. Nothing in nature could fail to 
awaken some generous emotion in his hospitable heart ; little children, 
an aged citizen, an old neighbor, the flower by the wayside, the clouds 
and sky, the birds in the trees, everything and everybody, each in their 
or its accustomed round would not fail to be befriended and noticed by 
his grace, his kindness and his friendly greeting and goodbye. 

I have heard the regret expressed that he did no more to make his 
place in our permanent literature more ample and secure. Secure it 
certainly will be by the high quality as literature, of his orations, speeches 
and reports, and of his contributions to the department of belles lettres. 
He did no more because his industry was not able to lengthen out his 
hours for work, already fully occupied. His proposed " Life of Mehemet 
Ali" — for which he had long since gathered the material, was not 
finished. But I would with a becoming modesty submit the judgment, 
that every thing which the youth of America of this age, for their hap- 
piness or as an incentive to the development of higher character and 
purer lives, need to know of Egypt's great captain, may be found in the 
brief chapter in his book upon " Syria," and that we can better afford to 
lose a whole library of biography of oriental military heroes rather than 
one Chancellor's Oration at Union College. 

A course of lectures upon " Political Ethics" was proposed for him. 
This met with his great sympathy and a desire to do it. But the pro- 
posal came too late. I am persuaded that such a course of lectures by 
him, published as a text-book for our schools, would have been of price- 
less value, and would have exerted an influence towards a higher moral 
conduct of political parties and of the private citizen in performance 
of his public duties, such as we cannot measure. 

The petty practical politician to whom the term had been taught by 
some cheap editor, was fond of calling him a " dilletante." To attach a 
derisive epithet to an opponent is one of the methods by which they 
hoped to invalidate his influence and silence his voice. And so they im- 
agined that the transfer of this term from the scope of art and music 
where it belongs to the field of politics and journalism, would tend to 
depreciate his recognition as a leader and reduce him to the limited 
authority of the shallow sciolist and amateur. They misunderstood the 
spirit and attainments of the man. His earlier contributions to litera- 
ture, so interesting to cultivated minds, so sweet in tone, so clear and 
dainty in expression, had misled the ordinary observer among the 
leaders in low and narrow fields of politics, into the belief that a broad- 
minded and learned scholar, a refined and elegant gentleman, would be 
as much out of place in criticising upon the platform or through the 
public press, their interpretations of the principles of a pure democracy 



25 

or the wayward courses of politicians, as he would be if his personal 
presence was ever known in their usual public resorts. But they, 
fatally in this instance, mistook their man. And while he was too re- 
fined and self-respecting to reply to the coarse and vulgar ribaldry by 
which he was sometimes attacked, yet the result of the debate carried on 
by him always in respectful phrase and upon rational and philosophic 
grounds soon showed which was the most sincere and stronger man. 
He, resting his faith upon the eternal strength of truth and right, guided 
by a conscience unswerving and alert, fortified by study pursued early 
and late with resolute and tireless industry, could not but be misunder- 
stood by the politician and camp follower, who mistake volubility for 
knowledge, activity in manipulation for statesmanship, and noise for 
strength. 

No student of the political history of the times in which he lived, 
will fail to do him exact justice, and the depreciating epithet which 
endeavored to fasten upon him the character of the cheap and trivial 
amateur will be forever forgotten. He will portray to the earnest 
student of his pages, the life of a modest and self-respecting man, 
faithful in the integrity of work set before him, constant and true to the 
high aims he had in view, retiring to his study and to his home, there 
away from the clamor and heat of public, office to help to work out in 
silence the problems which should solve the perplexities opposing the 
growth and advancement of mankind. 

As it was in the beginning so it shall always be, that the moral 
forces which ultimately move men, the still small voice of conscience, 
the idea which liberates a race, or establishes a church, or redeems a 
people, like the forces which hold the planets, or control the seasons, 
or produce the harvests, work silently and unseen ; so not with noise 
and clamor is chaos reduced and finally adjusted into the order of a 
world, neither are the tides with such an accompaniment so controlled by 
celestial influences, nor does the sap so ascend to nurture and strengthen 
the mighty oak and not <by earthquake or by flood, " not by thunder 
and lightning, but by the soft touch of Angels at midnight is the stone 
rolled away from the door of the sepulchre." 

But it is time this eulogy was spoken. I have endeavored not to 
over-state the character and accomplishments, the personal and perman- 
ent influence of our friend. I neither claim for him as an author be- 
yond the range of l>e//es lettres, nor as a critic of men and books, nor as a 
journalist and public speaker, any higher position than the one which 
he so well filled ; but I do certainly claim for him a higher place in 
American history and a larger and more enduring influence than he 
would have claimed for himself. In literature, when at his best, he was 
among the first in quality among American authors ; as a critic he was 
learned and philosophical, clear in judgment and possessed of a most 



26 

charming skill in expressing with candor, without detraction, his 
opinions, which left no rancor in any heart ; and as a journalist, mind- 
ful of the fatality of inaccuracy as to his facts, he was logical and un- 
compromising, but just. 

This urbane and lettered man, making his own choice of a private 
station, expended the talents of his disinterested and gracious nature in 
the fullest performance of every, even the slightest, duty which devolves 
upon a citizen of the Republic, both in his larger relations as well as 
to the town in which he lived. 

He was a close student of history and of the characters and achieve- 
ments of all great men ; he was familiar with the Constitution of the 
State and of the Union, and of the laws which enforce their duties and 
obligations ; he remembered that the cardinal principle of this govern- 
ment is the political equality of each one, but that this political equality 
carries with it its correlative duties ; that these duties may vary in each 
individual in just proportion to his intellectual force and mental equip- 
ment ; that every civic duty must be judged by its relation to the sphere 
of morals ; that the government of a great people is a business of the 
most gigantic proportions and its servants may not be lightly selected, 
nor with indifference to the public good ; that public office is a public 
service ; that the service is a public trust and belongs to no party or 
faction, but to the whole people ; that public office is neither to be 
actively sought or lightly declined ; that no patriotic citizen will hold it 
to be less than his highest public moral duty to serve his country and 
to give her his best service upon her demand ; that the sentiment of 
domestic patriotism must be cultivated, strengthened and enlarged ; 
that the decorative days of our history, the birthdays of our great men, 
the graves of our dead heroes, the commemoration of the great deeds, 
the common flag, with all that it may mean, must be remembered, 
in justice to our ancestors, our country and to our better selves, and 
celebrated with each returning year ; that the three great public instru- 
mentalities of all human progress, the family, fhe church and the school, 
cannot be allowed to decline but must be sustained at all hazards ; 
that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty ; and that it is the funda- 
mental duty of man to first consider his country, to avoid the appear- 
ance of evil, and to walk humbly before God ; he stood for purity of 
life, for sincerity of purpose, for stability in morals, for human sympathy 
controlled by reason, for courage of conviction, for iron will, for com- 
mon sense in judgment of men and affairs, for chivalric temper, for 
heroic constancy in work, for the widest and most liberal culture in 
letters ; and with the character derived from these elements, and with 
these sentiments dictated by his ardent love of country, which he im- 
pressed upon all in his public speech and private life and which he 
cherished to the last hour in his own soul, he has won the title, which, I 
think no one will dispute, of the ideal American citizen. 



27 

He came and went in a great company. They became and were to 
the end fellow-workers and personal friends — Lowell, Curtis, Whittier, 
Brooks. Their hearts swelled with the same emotions and throbbed in 
the same measure ; their sympathies strengthened the same cause ; their 
activities sought the same ends ; they would purify public life, dignify 
public service, invigorate public spirit, inspire the youth of America 
with the loftiest sentiments of purity and morals. 

As you crossed the threshold, when you entered the home of Tenny- 
son, upon the floor of the entrance hall, set in tile in the Welsh dialect, 
you read these words : 

" Truth against the world." 

It was the text which gave the direction to every effort of these 
noblest of American citizens in literature and politics, controlled every 
impulse, and tinged every mood and duty. 

It will continue to be well with us, if the fruit, from the maturest 
flowering of the tree of our civilization, which shall grow from the seed 
which was of their sowing, shall be as sure in its perfection as was the 
integrity of its origin and the purity of its hope, for they did not despair 
lest the idea of America or the fortune of the Republic could fail. 

" What sliall I do, lest life in silence pass ? " 
" And if it do, 
And never prompt the bray of noisy brass, 

What need'st thou rue ? 
Remember, aye the ocean-deeps are mute ; 

The shallows roar ; 
Worth is the ocean — fame is but the bruit 

Along the shore." 

" What shall I do to be forever known ? " 

" Thy duty ever." 
" This did full many who yet slept unknown," 

" Oh, never, never I " 
" Think'st thou perchance that they remain unknown 
Whom thou know'st not ? 
By angel trumps in heaven their praise is blown. 
Divine their lot.'' 

" What shall I do to gain eternal life ? 
" Discharge aright 
The simple dues with which each day is rife, 

Yea, with thy might. 
Ere perfect scheme of action thou devise 

Will life be fled, 
While he, who ever acts as conscience cries 

Shall live, though dead." 



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